Cummings, J. N. and S. Kiesler (2007). “Coordination costs and project outcomes in multi-university collaborations.” Research Policy 36(10): 1620-1634.
I stumbled across this article while making my way through last year’s Science of Team Science Conference. I listened to Jonathon Cummings present an overview of some of what’s in this paper. I highly recommend getting a copy of the paper if you’re at all interested in supporting collaborative research. While I agree with the authors that their results aren’t necessarily generalizable to all domains (they focused on a single grant program in area of interdisciplinary IT research and education), I appreciate the focus on coordination. It seems as though funding agencies and even the institutions themselves underestimate the difficulties inherent in multi-institutional collaborative research. Adding in the complexity of interdisciplinarity and coordination gets even more difficult.
This is one of the first articles I’ve seen that correlates successful research to specific activities of the collaboration, such as co-authorship, student exchanges, having a web portal and email lists, etc. I think the suggestion that Cummings and Kiesler make at the end, that perhaps all large collaborations should first have a small exploratory grant to support the development of the collaboration, is an excellent one. Such support would allow groups to work together to develop trust and establish a group identity. Cummings and Kiesler also suggest that funding agencies invest in training scientists on *how* to collaborate and coordinate large research projects. I would argue that this would be an excellent task for the institutions themselves to take on, in coordination with funding agencies. I would also argue that this is yet another area where librarians, with expertise in user needs assessment and community development, could make a huge impact.
